Are You Enchanted by Maya?

Our bodies occupy three dimensions instead of the two occupied by a movie, which means that I can go deeper into the image I see and touch, but that doesn’t make it any more real either.

What makes the body more real than a movie is Maya. Above all else, Maya is convincing. If it were not, we would all see through it, and yet the next layer of reality would be Maya as well. The process doesn’t ever have to end. As long as you want “proof” that the sensory world is real, Maya is deep enough to have all the layers you want.

Intellectually, we all know that empty space is all there is at the bottom of things, but to keep everyday life going, we agree to certain conventions. “Objective” science is the keeper of these ad hoc rules and performs an extremely valuable task so long as it remembers that rules are made to be broken.

Nothing forces you to try and break through Maya’s mask. As long as you accept the physical world at face value, your compliance keeps the machinery running. Rocks remain hard and solid, the wind blows, water makes things wet, and fire burns. Maya is very obliging.

The advantage of seeing through Maya is that the scientific spell, although it has given us this convenient modern life with its jets and computers, CAT scans and carrot juicers, has not done away with fear, violence, hatred, and suffering.

At a certain point, the mirage of molecules is not real enough to be satisfying. The illusion starts to dissolve–we have seen many instances of that by now–and then the search begins for the true reality hidden under the trick effects.

Maya's an Indian term meaning illusion, as in the world is illusion, and through quantum physics I guess you can reduce it intellectually to unsolidified space. Or looked at from the point of view of astronomy also reduce it to incredible insignificance. But intellectualisms themselves are no more than puffs of smoke in the wind and then it seems we're back at square one again, living in a world of duality with all of its conventions, occasional pleasures and more sufferings. But the term Maya traditionally doesn't make use of modern physics to justify its reality, and even among Indian spiritualists there are some differences as to the exact definition of Maya. Vaishnavas for example will say that our world is a perverted reflection of the spiritual world and indeed make a distinction between the material universe we are living in now and the spiritual universe in which the soul lives in the constant awareness and bliss of God and may even possess a spiritual (human-form) body. Other forms of Indian thought more closely resemble Buddhism without much reference to God as a spiritual personality, or much reference to God at all. The article above reminds me of a line from the Mahayana Buddhist Heart Sutra which comes to the conclusion that "form is emptiness, emptiness is form". Buddhism is after all, a very practical philosophy, the goal involving release from suffering through seeing through ignorance (greed and hatred). It brings to mind the words of Jesus "Blessed a